Oscar Wilde once said, ""We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." The stars have always had a powerful hold on Alma Alexander's imagination. "These stories are of places I visit when I choose to travel in a universe full of wonders that could one day be," she says, "rather than wandering along twisted paths laid down in a hand-drawn map of Middle Earth."

The International Bestselling Sequel to The Secrets of Jin-shei. Four hundred years after The Secrets of Jin-shei, the Syai Empire is on the brink of civil war. A new voice preaching equality promises hope for the downtrodden, but the ensuing people’s revolution brings terror, reeducation camps, and death...
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An angel offers a woman a tempting choice of a more fulfilling life, but at what cost?
A sinner finds that purgatory is just another form of hell, and release is milennia away.
A youth discovers that an act of theft has shattering consequences on many worlds.
These stories reveal the world around us that lurks just below the surface, a world filled with magic, horror, power and the unknown.

Sometimes having loved and lost is bitter and the grief is brutally hard to transcend. As the old song says, love's pleasures last for a moment... the grief of love lasts for a lifetime.
And still. We would not live without it. Love is what gives us strength, and gives us courage. Love is the thing that keeps us alive. And in the end it's what life is all about.

Ghost have always been with us, loving ghosts who cling to us because neither the living nor the dead can bear to let go, vengeful ghost. Ghosts can protect, and warn, and hurt. But mostly ghosts remember. They are the very essence of memory, carrying moments of frozen time with them. And with this they both move and frighten us. Here are the stories of three of them.

We think we domesticated cats, but we didn't. They chose us. They came to live by our side in exchange for being fed and adored, and we've been at their regal beck and call ever since. What they bring to us are magic, mystery, and secrets. In this collection of short stories you get a glimpse at what lies behind the curtain. These are the Cat Tales.

On the eve of the end of the world, Dec. 20, 2012, five friends meet in Spanish Gardens, the restaurant where they had celebrated their college graduation 20 years before. Over Irish coffees, they reminisce – and reveal long-held and disturbing secrets.
Each friend in turn is given a curious set of instructions by an enigmatic bartender named Ariel:

Enchanting stories from a master storyteller who owes a great deal to Oscar Wilde, whose dark and twisted fairy tales she had devoured as a young reader, and to the dramatic stories of Hans Christian Andersen.
"In my stories there is seldom a Happily Ever After," the author says. "I like my stories as I like my chocolate – dark, and a little bittersweet."